when life speaks; listen.

“Can too much love kill a person?”

I keep thinking and replaying that scene of myself in a neighborhood café of mismatched, unique wood furnitures last Wednesday afternoon, looking up to the ceiling for long minutes before letting out a deep sigh.

“I’m so emotionally exhausted,” I said at last.

I keep replaying these words that I said the Friday before, as I played with the straw of my iced coffee, in another café in my neighborhood. “I don’t want to reach a certain age, or have it be years from now where I’ll look at them and feel resentment gnawing on me. ‘Because I stayed back for you, look what happened to me – what happened to my life. I stayed and did everything you want me to, the way you want me to – and look what happened to me.’ I don’t want that to be my script,” I admitted, more to myself than for my listening ear. “If I don’t turn out well, at least let it be me who is responsible.”

For three weeks now, this suffocation is here.

I don’t know what to do with it anymore; I’m struggling. I am barely breathing. Asphyxia, it feels like fucking asphyxia. I feel like I am slowly being deflated of air and my sense of self, replaced by a copy of an able-bodied me, one who looks like but isn’t me. Who neither thinks like me, nor has my heart. I am scared of becoming mechanical; routine.

Can too much love kill a person?

Because I am loved. Dearly, so much. Overflowing. Unconditionally.

I am loved. And it is this exact love that has me packing my bag, ready to leave and move and start anew in just under three weeks. It is this love – exactly because I love, I keep insisting, is why I can’t stay.

“I don’t fight her-“

“Don’t fight her.”

“But this suffocation,” I press on, my voice heavy with emotions, “it’s here.” I press and point at my chest, where my heart throbs. Mine. I admit I am, I think, at this point where I’m desperate for ownership of myself. I want myself back. “I feel like even my sense of autonomy is being stripped away and I am just so tired. I’m so tired and I feel so suffocated to the point that I keep wanting to cry. I laid down all day on the hospital bed this afternoon and this just keeps playing on in my head… I’m unable to see any other realistic way out except to leave again. Even though I love this city. I love home. I want to stay. My entire life is here. And technically, there is nothing wrong; only love. There’s only love.”